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kkleiner writes "A student at MIT's Personal Robotics Group is going to put Microsoft's Kinect to a good use: controlling robots. Philipp Robbel has hacked together the Kinect 3D sensor with an iRobot Create platform and assembled a battery-powered bot that can see its environment and obey your gestured commands. Tentatively named KinectBot, Robbel's creation can generate some beautifully detailed 3D maps of its surroundings and wirelessly send them to a host computer. KinectBot can also detect nearby humans and track their movements to understand where they want it to go."
In related but less agreeable news, "Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."

With the calibration the accuracy of Kinect is much improved.. and ROS has algorithms that can do this automatically for anyone lucky enough to have a manipulator - speaking of which, when is Microsoft coming out with a $150 robotic arm?:)

While the work the MIT student did is noteworthy, it's really quite trivial thanks to ROS. I do robotics research using ROS, and SLAM, navigation, planning, etc. are all handled by ROS automatically as long as you provide the appropriate data streams. It's really as simple as plugging in a device. Even the gesture recognition is handled by the kinect driver and issuing commands from gestures is trivial at that point.

I think the real recognition should be given to the group at CCNY [ros.org] (no I don't got school there) who did the work of getting the kinect driver working in ROS in the first place, and aren't even mentioned in this article.

I'd mod you up if you weren't already at 5. I go to CCNY so I'm all for their group getting as much recognition as possible 'cause they've been really active in advocating open source tools in a school that's been really meh/haphazard about it.

Well the ideal distance for the sensors is apparently 6-8 feet. Unless you can get very close to the objects you're mapping, I'm guessing it'd be too lossy to just mount on a car and drive around. Having said that, maybe the data would still be "good enough" to render a very rough 3D landscape (i.e. probably good enough for most people's purposes). I'd definitely be interested to see the results of such a test.

Because they already have laser scanners on board [educatingsilicon.com], also seen on the us versions, and video [unc.edu] related ways of making 3D data...and I can only assume they have a lower resolution video to go with those pictures.

You think they'd shovel in the truckloads of cash it takes to map practically every street in the world and *not* take 3d data!?

That's just silly, you'd have to throw out all current TVs and make new ones that can't work with current AV systems. I mean, I know YOU think it's silly, but the mods disagree;)
More likely you'll just get Fox style 1 hour ads. Bones has been rendered nearly unwatchable. There was an episode last season where the secondary storyline was entirely about a character's new Honda. And, there have been others. Everybody comments on it. "Wow, a minivan, but you're not a soccer mom!" "Haha, that's a commo

No. What will happen is that ads will become louder and more obnoxious, so people will not be able to ignore them. And as long as it brings in more money then it costs, ads will be there.People are so dicile that they think that ads are something we can't live without anymore.

*Denham's Dentifrice*, "the lilies in the field", *Denham's Dentifrice*, "the lilies in the field", *Denham's Dentifrice*, "the lilies in the field",*Denham's Dentifrice*, *Denham's Dentifrice*, *Denham's Dentifrice*,

Indeed. I used to leave the ads on because they didn't bother me and occasionally you'd see a funny one that everyone would be talking about the next day. However, I have pretty sensitive hearing and if I have the TV at a volume that is right for the programs, I physically can't stand to sit through ads any more, I have no choice but to instantly change channel (or just DVR everything and fast forward the ads). I guess there must be enough people for who this isn't an issue to make it worth their annoying a

The effects are pretty well known. However they are seldom uniquely TV ads. You have a whole campaign, including TV ads. There also is product placement in the stores, magazine ads, viral and a whole lot more.

This is true for all analog -> digital advertising. Digital advertising is so enticing to brands because they can MEASURE how their ads are actually doing. Are people looking at my ad? Are they interacting with it? How long? Are then then going to my site? Are they buying something? Are they coming back later? Did they invite someone else? Did those people come to our site? Did they buy something? On and on and on...

Those are all questions we can answer now with digital advertising. You couldn't do that with "analog" ads in print, on TV or Radio.

So at first companies stopped spending as much, then they realized that their normal ads didn't work, but soon, they started spending much more money on digital because they could maximize their returns now.

So in this case, advertisers might start buying less ads if they see that people are ignoring them and leaving the room. However, advertisers will soon figure out what works and we'll have ads that are better tailored for the experience and will make people actually watch / interact with them. This happened with TV ads too... once DVR's became popular, advertisers created ads just for DVR's.

But then they'll realize that they can make you do stuff to keep your program going. This might be cool for kids and exercise programs, but I don't want to _have_ to do something so I can find out what happens in the last 15 minutes of {TV SHOW}.

I don't need those snake oil salesmen hocking their wares to me. I know what I want to buy. I rarely deviate. New packaging, a funny elf, or a cutesy jingle isn't going to influence me. Not to mention the baseness of their attempts at trying to herd the masses into the same coral as everyone else. Nothing like making everyone the Jones. Enough, I can make my own decisions on what I need day in and day out and I can read on the web reviews of products if I have questions. A simple search for the "best

I don't follow. Why is your Xbox360 on when you're watching TV? Doesn't everyone tip over or unplug webcams when they're not in use anyway? Are they going to make a functioning kinect setup a requirement for watching TV?

Put something in front of it until you need to use it again. I have an xbox360 but I don't use it much. I use my PS3 as it is technologically superior in all ways. XBOX360 only has games of which I rarely play.

Which is funny, because there actually value did not diminish. If there where getting a million dollars worth of advertising, knowing who walks out doesn't matter because they had always been doing that. IN fact, they should pay more for this information. Now the can do real world research on how to get people to watch ads.

In related but less agreeable news, "Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."

Seriously, this is the first thing I thought when I read aboutthe Kinect. Here is a box, wired to the internet, with a hundred little beams that can not only tell what you're doing, what the room looks like to absurd levels of detail. Talk about 1984-style, in-soviet-russia type monitoring.

Forget the advertisers, with enough of these things deployed the feds won't need those vans parked outside your house, they'll grab the data in real-time from either the ISP or Mircrosoft.

Just like everyone cleans out their cookies, flash cookies and browser database?
Think of the fun the feds/state task force could have with a new MS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Lantern_(software) [wikipedia.org] for the Kinect.
Once you are on their list for a warrantless networking sneak and peek, your junk is moving up the tubes.
The audio, visual and depth to plots or unatural acts on your sofa.

The first thing I thought about was cheap motion capture / do-it-yourself BVH file generation; I'm a semi-pro animator & cgi guy, and this is sort of a holy grail for the basement computer graphics community.

I'm pretty sure all a person would need is 2 or more Kinects and some relatively simple code to make something that could compete with systems that cost around $5000. I waste a LOT of money on various software packages, but 5k is pretty much out of the question; an additional Xbox 360 and 2 Kinects, though... There would be a LOT more amateur and low dollar animations made.

But, after that, yeah, the level of monitoring people would be potentially opening themselves to is pretty amazing, also.

1. you don't need an xbox 3602. trying to use two will interfere with each other..

See, the way it works is, the unit projects an pattern in the infrared and a camera creates images which are processed to infer depth. That camera is calibrated with the standard color camera so you get full RGB-depth. So if you had two projecting the pattern you wouldn't get good images in the infrared.

One way to defeat this may be to add a shutter to the projector and synchronize them so one is projecting when the other is

It would also be great for 3D artists, since it would partially bridge the gap between physical and digital modeling. This could let somebody with old-school sculpting 'skillz' create some really nice 3D object meshes. Required hardware: Lazy suzan, Microsoft Kinect, 3D scanning software, well lit room. (the most expensive item being the software.)

Not just for detail objects either-- Could realistically be mounted to a rotary table, and placed inside a building to grab the interior as a 3D mockup. Great f

Seriously, this is the first thing I thought when I read aboutthe Kinect. Here is a box, wired to the internet, with a hundred little beams that can not only tell what you're doing, what the room looks like to absurd levels of detail. Talk about 1984-style, in-soviet-russia type monitoring.

Forget the advertisers, with enough of these things deployed the feds won't need those vans parked outside your house, they'll grab the data in real-time from either the ISP or Mircrosoft.

It looks like the book/movie might come true after all. A bunch of robots controlled remotely will seek total domination. Though I am sure the US military is thinking about ways to incorporate such technology for drones. Someone waving a gun? The drone can detect that and it takes them out. Who needs soldiers to storm buildings anymore? A battlefield with nothing but machines is a scary thought really.

Simpler and more effective to have the drone remotely controlled by a human. It might seem cheaper to have them autonomous, but they'd be too easily fooled - for instance, put a pistol inside a doll, the robot thinks you're innocently carrying a child, bang - one dead lump of expensive hardware, how do you react to that, shoot on sight anyone carrying a baby?

With the intrusive monitoring possibilities of this system the 'battlefield' is rather quickly going to become your living room. Microphones don't seem to be included yet, but that's a really cheap mod and will probably be requested by users that want voice activated menus.

You do understand that most people won't be made aware that it's happening hence they won't know to turn it off or unplug it? When they do find out there'll be an outcry in that parents will realize that under age children are being tracked by it, since a lot of these will also be located in the kids room. And, after a while the complacency of the living room will take over and people will just forget to turn off or unplug, or the kids will be too distracted to think about it, leaving it on to be spied on

"You do understand that most people won't be made aware that it's happening hence they won't know to turn it off or unplug it?"

Yes, but I also understand most people wont care. Just like around 9% of the entire world's population (which is a lot when you consider a large portion are too poor to have internet access) simply don't give a fuck when handing over all their personal details to Facebook to sell on.

You assume people actually care about their privacy, they don't until it comes to bite them (i.e. ide

Hmmm, it was my understanding that most people will care. I wonder how that measures against your understanding.

Certainly they care. In fact, there's a precedent to show that people do care. Specifically the outcry at the spying on children by the high school where they snapped over 50,000 photos of children; with the faculty, including the Principle, made disparaging remarks about some of the children in emails regarding the photos. There are numerous ongoing lawsuits about that currently. And it all

True, but a remote control mechanism that you have to go cover up/uncover every time you need to use it doesn't seem very effective. Unfortunately I suspect most people would just take the privacy hit and leave it uncovered. It raises a LOT of tricky issues though. What are they capturing precisely and where does it go (if they're capturing video for instance, is all the analytics done locally and the video discarded, or does the stream get sent back to MS or even out to third parties - considering these ar

I guess you could do something with the router to block the content from being transmitted back to the advertisers. And, really, what's the point of telling the advertisers this unless Microsoft wants to be collecting it for them. And, the only way it would be useful would be to have it tied into a "google tv" type device or have a TV specially built to connect a device such as this.

Dont be dramatic. How is this different than laptops shipping with built-in webcams, which seems to be every laptop on the market? A few years ago it was "ZOMG MS IS SENDING YOUR DATA TO THE NSA - WE FOUND A STRING NAMED NSA SOMEWHERE IN WINDOWS!!!" The conspiracy theories are cute, but I'll wait for hard evidence, thanks.

Yay! I've been wanting my very own telescreen for a long time. Because let's face it: the biggest problem with TV is that it doesn't watch you while you're watching it. But now that problem has been fixed, and I'm glad to see Microsoft has recognized the opportunities from letting other people monitor you without disclosure, oversight, or consent. But they sure kept us waiting: 26 years behind schedule.

An MIT student works out an interesting way to merge Kinetic with existing technologies for the benefit of users.

vs.

A Microsoft rep talks about how Kinetic can be used to foster yet more advertising on people...

"I liked the University. They gave us money, they gave us the facilities and we didn't have to produce anything! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results. You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there."

Bingo! This applies to so many other companies out there as well. Google/Facebook? You may be a user, but you are not a customer. The advertisers are the customers, you are a product. Sometimes, it's worth it. Sometimes it ain't.

Unless you're paying for Google docs or enterprise stuff. Then you're a customer. I think the fact that they have both customer/users and product/users is one of the important things keeping them (somewhat more) honest. If they screwed the product/users like Facebook does, all those

An MIT student works out an interesting way to merge Kinetic with existing technologies for the benefit of users.

Like this technology isn't going to be commercialized for Microsoft's benefit and others.

OLPC also emerged from MIT. 1.5 million units distributed. The winner in that round? XP on the Netbook. The "walled garden" of the iOS. Google and AdSense. The "open source" product whose sole commercial purpose is to sell the buyer to the advertiser.

So, the police get a warrant-less wiretap. They then check the premises to see if it has a kinect. When they find out it turns out that they can determine how many people are in the main room of the house, what the interior looks like, how people are positioned, and how they are moving. They then, without warning (thanks to the US Supreme court), bash down the front door.

They rush in and disrupt everything killing the dog and frightening everyone inside. Dad doesn't know it's the cops because they didn'

So, wait, let me get this straight. Reverse-engineering the drivers for use on non-Xboxes is "hacking" and "unintended" use of a Microsoft product, but Microsoft is only too happy to sell this product to advertisers? Because you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that the advertisers will not be using an Xbox.

No, MS's PR drones just issued a blanket statement saying they wouldn't support reverse engineerd Kinect units and they'd prefer you to connect them to Xboxes instead. Seems reasonable to me. Did you expect GPL'd code for them from MS?
And if MS sell any advertising service (and it's a big IF, the CFO said it was possible, not that it would happen) then obviously part of the service they offer will include support. I could imagine your Kinect in your home tailoring ads to number of people, size etc. I co

In related but less agreeable news, "Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."

Is there any way to remove the mod capabilities from the morons that modded me down?

but instead of being the eyes of a totalitarian state he is the eyes of Big Business. Does the thin sliver of difference between coercion by the state and the connivance of Big Business matter? Both seek to compromise our freedom.

The KinectBot will count the number of people watching a movie on a TV, and then that will be used to charge the appropriate per-viewer based fees. And you can earn credits for staying in the room during any TV commercials before/after the movie. And of course, there's no credits given for only partially watching a crappy movie. But if more people enter the room during the movie, the fee will go up...

I'd like to submit a vote for hooking this system up to a lawn mower. Automated lawn mowing is why I became an engineer, but I wasn't successful in finding a job doing it. If I could now purchase a lawn mower that would automatically mow between midnight and 3am and a rate slow enough to be nearly silent (a reel mower can do this), sign me up. In fact, this appears to be possible or even easier with the Kinect requirement of little ambient light and IR interference being a problem. I don't like current

Didn't Comcast do this last year when the story broke that they were putting cameras into the cable set top boxes? I guess if you add in a videogame interface it becomes more palatable to the masses? Link [slashdot.org]

This makes you think about the possibilities even for the military. This would help out our troops so much with clearing an area or room or even diffusing a hostage situation. Let's just hope that since its Microsoft that they fix any bugs unlike the failed windows vista...just sayin

"Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."

Another use for my sharpie besides redacting "In God We Trust" from currency--blacking out Kinect sensors used for ad placement.

yeah, should be some laws regarding how your image and actions are used for sure... seems like that's in direct conflict with your right to privacy. Playing a video game you would not know, as a lay-person, that your image was being transmitted out to third parties.

May sound like a joke but I guarantee you that the MPAA would love nothing less than being able to license HD-Ray movies on a per-viewer basis, and refuse to play if your doberman is in the room. I already stole revenue from them when I watched my brother's copies of the Spiderman trilogy on his HD TV (I guess technically I stole from Sony too, as it was a sony TV and a PS3 I was using...) without paying a cent

Actually iris scanning is here now, and actually fast and reliable. We tested a device that integrates with access control systems not long ago and I was absolutely shocked at how amazingly well it worked. Enrollment is done by standing anywhere in a 1 meter circle centered 2 meters from the front of the device, in less than three seconds, both eyes. Any height from Shaquile O'Neil to a wheelchair-bound granny. We tried, and couldn't make it fail. The only obstruction at the moment keeping it from wide

I thought Kinect did that out of the box - I remember reading that it used facial recognition to sign you into your account. Did they drop this? And if not, what happens if you're one of identical twins?

There's money in it. And it's not necessarily bad, mind you. I admit Microsoft's suggestion sounds creepily like pretty invasive spying, but I'm toying with ideas to have big screens with advertisements or other messages in some public space, respond to people standing in front of them. Show several items, and zoom in on the one they look or point at, for example. Stop playing a message when the person walks away. Show stuff bigger when they're far away, smaller when they're near. That sort of stuff.

It's Microsoft's legendary marketing department in action. "A story's about to break about some innovative use of clever technology that's only just been released? That might cause people to look on MS products, and by extraction the company itself, favourably! Quick, let's put out a press release about how Kinect watches you channel surfing in your underwear."